How social networks and relationships can affect your health

Eventually, we'll know who’s at risk of weight gain, heart attack, and diabetes by looking at the outcomes of a person’s friends. James Fowler, PhD, professor of medical genetics and political science at UCSD, explains.

Transcript

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I think we're going to see a revolution in this decade in terms of how we use friends. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:11

We're going to be using friends data to do risk prediction. We're going to do a much better job of figuring out who is at risk and who's not at risk for certain outcomes,

00:20

like weight gain, or heart attack, diabetes, by looking at the outcomes of a person's friends.

00:26

And by having a much better ability to predict who's at risk, we'll be able to focus like a laser beam our resources on those individuals

00:33

to try to get this magnifying effect of network. So-- so friends as data is one thing that is going to be more utilized over the course

00:40

of the next 10 years. We also have, um, friends as motivators. So I think increasingly, what you're going to see,

00:46

for example, are health coaching programs are going to be oriented towards getting friends and family involved. You might even see health coaches actively

00:52

engaging not just their clients, but their clients social network in order to try and motivate and reinforce,

01:00

um, you know, positive behavior change. We already know that coaching works. But I think we could probably make it much more effective by bringing friends in.

01:06

And there's some experimental evidence that this is true, that people would diet together do better than people diet alone. And close friends dieting together better than--

01:14

than acquaintances dieting together. This is work by [INAUDIBLE] at Brown University. So I think you're going to see more of this online,

01:20

utilizing these social connections to recommend people that you get involved whenever you're trying to make a positive, uh, change.

01:27

And then the thing that I think is the most important thing is just friends as multipliers, realizing that there are some people who are highly influential.

01:34

And so it pays to really get those individuals on board earlier and to invest more resources in them in order

01:41

to try to change their behavior. Because when you change them, you're not just changing them. You're changing, in some cases, dozens and hundreds of other people.

01:48

And we're actively engaged in this. It's-- it's really difficult, um, to, again,

01:54

to bring together the online data, uh, in terms of healthy online data and in terms of social. And so our early research has been

02:01

in things outside of health, like in terms of voting. But in that early research, we're-- we're showing that

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a single message on Facebook can change the real behavior of hundreds of thousands of people. And I'm hopeful that-- that just like we've

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been able to do this for voting, we're going to be able to do this for health. [HEART BEAT]